Re-Post: My Sun Dog

I wrote this blog a year and a half ago.  I was much more emotional then, because the thought of losing my Sun Dog was a shock and a reality completely foreign to my imagination.  We had a last minute opportunity for her survival, granting us another 18 months of her eager tail wagging.  Today we put her to sleep, ending a struggle to stand and breathe.  But she will always, always, be my beautiful, aggressively affectionate Sunny. 


When I was three, I was bit by a dog. It happened at a dinner party in the home of my parents’ friends. It’s strange. To me, it’s an amusing anecdote because the thing I remember most was waking up the next morning with a swollen lip and getting French toast in bed. For my parents, it wasn’t such a happy story. But… it didn’t stop them from having dogs in the house. And it didn’t make me love the spastic quadrupeds with any less devotion.

I really wanted to get my own dog this year. I was all set to adopt and invest in that lifestyle change when my landlord decided she didn’t want the risk of liability. I still want a dog. I just accept it isn’t going to happen right now.

I was given the option of a cat… but… I’m a dog person, through and through. I don’t dislike cats. I do dislike that they sleep on your head and really could care less about you sometimes. Or maybe that’s just because I give off the air of canine sympathy. Who knows? But dogs… dogs make me smile.

Last night, my parents’ dog got hit by a car. I honestly still don’t fully comprehend the story from my mother’s tearful retelling, but it isn’t quite clear who hit her. The driver didn’t stop. But a nurse did and helped my mother get Sunny off the road onto the end of the driveway until my father got home to take her to the vet.

Then I get the call. Anyone who has had any pet will sympathize. Pets are… well, they are family. The best kind of family, really. All they demand is food and attention. No emotional strife. No battle for power. If anything, they are constant, unrelenting sympathizers. A source of entertainment. Athletic trainers. Friends. No matter what you do. As long as you feed them and give them love.

I’ve always been a dog person. But I’ve been a nomad with more devotion to life outside a home to allow my own pet. So often I was recruited to pet sit. And so, in 1998 when my aunt and her family adopted two puppies, I was frequently staying at their home while they traveled. They were beagle/lab mixes and an amusing lesson in sibling dynamics. After a year and a half those sisters were enough of a handful that they asked my parents to take the eldest.

I was back in college at that point, finding myself spending summers between semesters at their house and then again for several months after I returned from another country. Sunny and I developed a kinship, mostly through our long walks along the tree lined roads of my hometown. In a way she was my dog, because I knew her first. But… eventually I moved away. My sister moved away. And the dog became the comfort for the empty nest.

Her sister died last fall, thirteen years catching up with her little black frame. But Sunny, in spite of some challenged hearing and slower speed, is still belligerent in her quest for affection. Her tail still wags with dangerous speed at the level of the coffee table. And she still settles at your feet waiting for that crumb to drop.

The prognosis is still in the air. I admit I opened myself to the possibility it isn’t that far away. She is 13 – that’s 90 in dog years. But… it doesn’t soften the blow. I hurt for the hole that will be left. I hurt for my parents who worry about their last home dwelling child. I hurt for her pain and my heart that sinks at the idea of a world without a sundog.